This Harvard Crimson story discusses the new TrueViews site that aims to improve representation by providing elected officials with more information about their constituents’ policy views.

Professors from Harvard and George Washington University launched a data visualization tool early last month to help legislators better assess local opinions on policies.

TrueViews — a website built in collaboration between Harvard Law School and the Bloomberg Center for Cities — displays a color-coded United States map containing detailed statistics of political perspectives on a variety of topics, including criminal justice, abortion and gun control.

To create the site, researchers relied on data from 18 national surveys conducted between 2009 through 2023. The site displays public viewpoints on 32 policy questions by zip code, city, county, district, and state.

Harvard Law School professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos said he hopes the tool will help bridge the gap between constituents’ desires and elected officials’ policy priorities.

“There’s a distressing pattern today where representation and policy is often quite distorted relative to what people want, and there’s some evidence that some of that distortion is just because policymakers don’t know what people think and want,” Stephanopoulos said.

Stephanopoulos added that, according to the data, the country is less polarized than the public often assumes.

“It was a pleasant surprise to see the variety and the complexity of public opinion, and to see that it doesn’t always boil down to the standard red-blue, or north-south, or city-country cleavages,” he said.

Yesterday was publication day for my new book, Aligning Election Law. The book builds on several earlier articles of mine, and argues that promoting alignment between governmental outputs and popular preferences should be an overarching goal for election law. You can download the book’s introduction for free here. For ELB readers in the Boston area, I’ll be giving a talk about the book at MIT on Oct. 21 at 6pm; folks can RSVP here. And here’s the book’s abstract:

This book argues that alignment between governmental outputs and popular preferences should be a tenet of the law of democracy. Alignment is a core democratic value. Yet it isn’t appreciated by election law scholarship, much of which focuses on other democratic goals. Nor do the courts consider alignment when deciding election law cases. In fact, the Roberts Court has undermined alignment at almost every turn. And in part because of these rulings, modern American politics is marred by pervasive misalignment. If alignment were recognized as a legal and political principle, it could function as a sword or as a shield. As a sword, alignment would be wielded offensively to strike down misaligning electoral practices (or not to enact them in the first place). As a shield, alignment would be deployed defensively to justify aligning electoral practices (in litigation or in public discourse). The federal courts could be a valuable ally in the struggle for alignment. Unfortunately, the Roberts Court has been a foe rather than a friend, declining to invalidate many misaligning policies and nullifying several aligning ones. Fortunately, federal litigation isn’t the only route to a more aligned political system. Congress could pass a range of potent aligning laws. So could state legislatures. State courts are also more promising venues, relative to their federal counterparts, because they adhere to a democracy principle unfamiliar to federal law. Last but not least, the people themselves could pursue alignment on their own, through either direct democracy or wholly private activity.

I wrote this column for The Hill on the potential of TrueViews to improve representation by better informing politicians about their constituents’ policy views. I also did this radio interview about TrueViews with Inside Sources.

Politicians’ knowledge of their constituents’ views is worse than you’d expect for professionals whose careers depend on public approval. 

A pioneering 2018 study found that Republican state legislators err by 10 to 40 percentage points in their perceptions of voters’ positions on issues, including abortion, gun control and immigration. Moreover, these politicians almost always err in a conservative direction, mistakenly believing voters are far more right-wing than they actually are. . . .

If politicians’ skewed perceptions of their constituents’ preferences contribute to polarization, could correcting these biases lead to better representation? An innovative 2008 experiment suggests that it could. 

A pair of researchers conducted a large-scale survey of New Mexicans’ views on a pending fiscal proposal. This poll was big enough to generate estimates of public opinion in each State House district. The scholars then circulated the results to some (randomly chosen) State House members but not others. 

Among the legislators who were informed about their voters’ preferences, their votes on the fiscal proposal were highly responsive to public opinion. Conversely, among the legislators who denied this data, there was no correlation between their votes and their constituents’ attitudes toward the bill.

Unfortunately, this experiment is the exception, not the rule. In general, politicians lack policy-specific information about their voters’ preferences. Presidents often have access to this data at the national level. But at every subnational level, this data isn’t widely available. The representational gains that would follow if politicians were more knowledgeable about their constituents’ views therefore don’t materialize because most politicians aren’t well-informed. . . .

[A] new site called TrueViews, which I helped to produce, uses many national surveys to estimate people’s preferences on many issues within many geographic units. In sum, TrueViews covers dozens of policies and geographic units ranging from municipalities to districts to states and periods from 2009 to the present.

For the first time, the data make it possible for politicians of all stripes to learn instantly what their voters want. As these capabilities become better known, they could plausibly dampen polarization and bolster representation.

For politicians who would like to abide by their constituents’ preferences but frequently don’t know what they are, the new public opinion tools supply this exact information. They enable politicians who want to be faithful delegates to be faithful delegates.

What about politicians who would rather advocate other positions, like those of their parties or donors? For them, the new tools raise the cost of defying the will of the people. 

Candidates running against these politicians could highlight their divergence from voters’ preferences. Journalists could run stories about this mismatch. Activists could make it the target of protests. In some cases, these efforts might persuade these politicians to heed public opinion. In others, these politicians might be ousted from office and replaced by rivals more mindful of voters’ views.

In the 2010s, Ohio voters approved constitutional amendments that aimed to curb partisan gerrymandering primarily by requiring parties’ legislative seats to be roughly proportional to their statewide votes. This strategy has now come to be seen as a failure because it didn’t include structural reform — i.e., it didn’t transfer mapmaking authority from self-interested politicians to an independent commission. In 2022, politicians repeatedly enacted plans flaunting the state constitution’s proportionality requirement and ignored the Ohio Supreme Court’s efforts to enforce this requirement. So this year, Ohio voters have put a measure on the ballot — Issue 1 — that would pair a proportionality criterion with structural reform. In order to “ban partisan gerrymandering,” Issue 1 would both require “the statewide proportion of districts in each redistricting plan that favors each political party [to] correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio” and create an independent commission insulated from political pressures.

Last month, in an Orwellian move, the Ohio Ballot Board drafted ballot language for Issue 1 that flips the measure’s meaning on its head. According to the Board’s summary, Issue 1 seeks to “[r]epeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and to “require[]” the proposed commission “to gerrymander state legislative and congressional districts.” Unsurprisingly, the measure’s proponents objected to this deceptive language. I was also part of a group of scholars (along with Ned Foley, Ruth Greenwood, David Niven, and Dan Tokaji) that filed an amicus brief criticizing the Board’s misleading summary of Issue 1.

Yesterday, in another regrettable development, the Ohio Supreme Court mostly upheld the ballot language for Issue 1. The crux of the court’s reasoning was that some people refer to district plans that try to achieve proportional representation as “bipartisan gerrymanders.” It’s therefore accurate, according to the court, to say that Issue 1 requires gerrymandering — bipartisan gerrymandering.

Under Gaffney, a two-party, proportional-representation redistricting model may not be unconstitutional. But it is gerrymandering. . . .

What these rules require falls within the meaning of “gerrymander.” They mandate the new commission draw district boundaries that give a political advantage to an identifiable group—Republicans in some districts and Democrats in others. They require the commission to draw these partisan-advantaged districts at the expense of traditional, neutral redistricting criteria to overcome natural political geography and achieve proportional representation. These rules are not meaningfully different from those that produced the Gaffney plan. See Gaffney, 412 U.S. at 737-738. Because that was gerrymandering, Gill, 585 U.S. at 61, the requirements at issue here may fairly be called gerrymandering.

In her partial dissent, Justice Brunner pointed out that the Board’s summary never uses the adjective, “bipartisan,” before “gerrymandering.” The Board’s summary thus suggests that Issue 1 requires the proposed commission to engage in the more familiar form of gerrymandering — partisan gerrymandering. But that suggestion is wrong. Not only is proportionality closer to the opposite than the essence of partisan gerrymandering, the Ohio Constitution already requires proportionality and the Ohio Supreme Court has already characterized this requirement as an anti-gerrymandering provision.

. . . [D]espite the claims of the majority, gerrymandering is not proportionality. Gerrymandering contemplates abuse; proportionality contemplates fairness—that is, districts’ close correspondence in their partisan political leanings to the partisan political leanings of the voters of the state. . . .

. . . [T]his is similar—but linguistically different—from what Article XI, Section 6(A) of the Ohio Constitution already provides. The difference, according to the majority opinion, is that the standards under Article XI, Section 6 need only be “attempted” to be met. Majority opinion at ¶ 37. The majority’s discussion of gerrymandering equates it with proportionality, and it finds that the proposed amendment requires gerrymandering, while current law requires only attempted gerrymandering. This is nonsensical.

Both Justice Brunner’s and Justice Donnelly’s opinions also include pointed passages about the black-is-white quality of the Board’s summary. Here’s Justice Brunner:

The majority opinion reflects an abject failure of this court to perform an honest constitutional check on the ballot board’s work. We should be requiring a nearly complete redrafting of what is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen. The ballot board’s actions, endorsed by a majority of this court, leave any objective observer scratching their head and asking, “Who’s in charge here—Ohio’s people or its politicians?”—which ironically is the essential issue the proposed constitutional amendment seeks to address.

And here’s Justice Donnelly:

Given that the four members of this court in the majority today apparently think that the word “ ‘boneless’ ” means “ ‘you should expect bones,’ ” Berkheimer v. REKM, L.L.C., 2024-Ohio-2787, ¶ 38 (Donnelly, J., dissenting), I’m sure it comes as no great surprise that they think that a constitutional amendment to “ban partisan gerrymandering” means to “require[] gerrymander[ing].” While the majority’s Amelia Bedelia approach to the law and the absurdity of the majority’s conclusions might make you laugh, it should also make you outraged. Everyone should be outraged by today’s decision, regardless of whether one thinks the proposed constitutional amendment is a wonderful idea, a terrible idea, or anything in between.

Harvard Law Today covers TrueViews, the new tool for seeing public opinion on many policies and at many geographic levels.

[T]hanks to a new freeware data tool created by experts from Harvard Law School and the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, determining the policy preferences of constituents in any geographic location within the United States just became infinitely easier.

At first glance, the visionary “TrueViews” data platform looks like a standard map of the United States. But as soon as users move their cursor over any geographic location on the diagram, the tool’s true value comes to life.

Using survey results from over one million Americans, TrueViews provides users an immediate snapshot of how residents in any particular state, county, district, city/town, or zip code feel about 32 different policy issues ranging from marijuana decriminalization to universal healthcare to fossil fuel emission limits. 

By simply selecting one of the issues — for example, “Do you support or oppose eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders?” — and any jurisdiction within the United States, TrueViews immediately generates a color-coded geographic overview and estimates of what percentage of residents support or oppose the policy selected. 

The goal, according to its creators? Equip decisionmakers and information providers throughout the country with a more accurate understanding of how the people they serve feel about important policy issues.

Ned Foley, Ruth Greenwood, David Niven, Dan Tokaji, and I filed this amicus brief today, exclusively in our personal capacities, arguing that the Ohio Ballot Board’s summary of Ohio’s anti-gerrymandering initiative is deeply misleading. While the initiative would be one of the country’s most potent safeguards against gerrymandering, the Board’s summary says that it would require the proposed commission to gerrymander. Here are some excerpts from the brief’s introduction:

Orwell himself would have trouble topping the efforts of the Ohio Ballot Board. Legally obligated to draft ballot language that “fairly and accurately” summarizes Issue 1—a proposed constitutional amendment that would curb partisan gerrymandering in Ohio—the Board instead adopted text telling voters that Issue 1 would itself constitute gerrymandering. According to the Board’s up-is-down summary, the amendment supposedly “[r]epeal[s] constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” Relators_034 (emphasis added). In fact, Issue 1 dramatically strengthens these safeguards. The Board’s summary also falsely accuses the amendment of “requir[ing]” the proposed commission “to gerrymander the boundaries of . . . districts to favor either of the two largest political parties.” Id. (emphasis added). The whole point of Issue 1 is actually to prevent gerrymandering by stopping self-interested politicians from drawing district lines and subjecting district maps to a partisan fairness requirement.

. . . First, while conceptions of gerrymandering abound, no common notion of this activity equates it with ensuring that parties’ legislative representation is congruent to their popular support. On some accounts, this kind of congruence is the antithesis of gerrymandering. At worst, from other perspectives, such congruence is orthogonal to the injury inflicted by gerrymandering.

Second, Ohio’s distinctive history establishes that, in this State, partisan gerrymandering can’t possibly mean correspondence between parties’ statewide seat shares and vote shares (“seat-vote correspondence”). This is because Ohio already has a state constitutional requirement that “[t]he statewide proportion of districts . . . favor[ing] each political party shall correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters.” Ohio Const. art. XI, § 6(B). This Court is intimately familiar with this requirement, having decided a series of cases about it just two years ago. In these cases, all of the Court’s members—both in the majority and dissenting—agreed that the requirement aims to thwart gerrymandering. No one voiced the Board’s preposterous position that the requirement compels gerrymandering.

Third, because the U.S. Supreme Court has commented extensively on the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and proportional representation, it’s important to set the record straight about what that Court has said. When a plurality of the Court recognized that gerrymandering could be unconstitutional, these justices held that a party’s disproportionally low representation is an element of the offense—just not enough, alone, to prove liability. Over the years, several justices stated that a district plan’s achievement of proportional representation is a valid defense to a charge that the plan is an unlawful gerrymander. And more recently, when the Court deemed partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable, the majority asserted that plaintiffs challenging gerrymandering necessarily seek proportional representation. Proportional representation must be distinct from gerrymandering, then, since it would be nonsensical for gerrymandering’s foes to ask for a remedy of more gerrymandering.

This launch event for TrueViews will be held on Tuesday, September 3, from 11am – 12:15pm, both in-person and virtually. TrueViews is a new site I’ve been working on together with Justin De Benedictis-Kessner, Ruth Greenwood, and Chris Warshaw, funded by the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. For the first time, TrueViews will make available public opinion data on many policies and at many geographic levels (from states to districts to zip codes). I’ll be saying more about TrueViews in the coming days, but for now, here’s the summary for the launch event. You can RSVP here.

Do candidates seeking political office know what their constituents think and care about? A new resource developed by Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic and supported by the Local Politics Lab at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University provides new, granular data on public opinion in the United States. TrueViews can address misrepresentation and polarization by providing city leaders and other policymakers with precise insights into the policy preferences of their residents. The data platform can also bolster scholarly research on local politics.

TrueViews uses cutting-edge methodology to produce accurate estimates of public opinion in previously unavailable geographical snapshots, including by city or town, zip code, and even school district. Meet the faculty behind TrueViews as they discuss the use of state-, county-, and city-level public opinion data on key issues such as criminal justice, education, immigration, or taxes.

This is a guest post by Maureen O’Connor, Retired Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.

James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, warned us about the dangers of factions—groups that, driven by self-interest, work against the public good. 

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,” Madison wrote.

This threat of self-interested political factions treading on the constitution and the rule of law foretold by Madison is happening today in my home state of Ohio.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose, acting as the leader of a faction intent on preserving political power, has manipulated the ballot language for Issue 1, a redistricting reform amendment in Ohio that is on the ballot this Nov. 5. As chair of the Ohio Ballot Board, LaRose pushed through this misleading language on a slim 3-2 vote, using the power of his office not for the general public good but to advance his own private agenda.

As the former Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, I’ve dedicated much of my career to upholding the rule of law and ensuring that every citizen’s voice is heard. The election law community should take notice of the lawsuit filed by Citizens Not Politicians against the Ohio Ballot Board and LaRose challenging their illegal decision. This lawsuit is a fight for the future of fair elections in Ohio and it is a test of the checks and balances in our three-branch system of representative government. It could have broader implications for what self-interested politicians and their factions think they can get away with in the future.  

On August 19, 2024, Citizens Not Politicians, alongside dedicated Ohioans Cara Dillon and Annette Tucker Sutherland, filed an original action in the Ohio Supreme Court. The lawsuit challenges the misleading and illegal ballot language adopted by the Ohio Ballot Board for Issue 1. The Ballot Board’s action is a blatant abuse of power, designed to protect political interests rather than inform Ohio voters.

The Ohio Constitution and the Revised Code require that ballot language must be accurate, impartial, and not prejudicial. Unfortunately, the language approved by the Ballot Board violates these legal standards. It misrepresents the amendment’s provisions, falsely claiming, for example, that it would require gerrymandering to favor the two largest political parties. In reality, the amendment would do the opposite—banning partisan gerrymandering and ensuring fair representation for all Ohioans.

This lawsuit is not just about correcting these falsehoods. It’s about protecting our democracy from manipulation. It’s about ensuring that every voter has the information they need to make an informed decision at the ballot box. And it’s about holding those in power accountable when they attempt to undermine the rights of Ohioans to shape their government.

I urge those in the election law community both in Ohio and nationally to follow this case closely. The Ohio Supreme Court’s decision will have profound implications for the integrity of our elections. You can track the case by visiting the Ohio Supreme Court docket at [this link](https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#/caseinfo/2024/1200). But don’t stop there. Share the news of this lawsuit with your networks. Talk to your friends, your family, your neighbors. Ohio’s future is on the line, and it’s up to all of us to defend it.

Madison’s solution to combating factions was in the constitution and the rule of law. “There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.”

One cause of factions is gerrymandering, and the factions of politicians who benefit from gerrymandering in Ohio are doing everything in their power – legal or illegal – to stop this constitutional amendment that threatens their outsized, undeserved, and unconstitutional power and influence.   

This is not just a legal issue; it’s a moral one. The right to fair elections is fundamental to our democracy. As Ohioans, we must stand together against any attempt to subvert that right. Please, stay informed, stay engaged, and help spread the word about this critical fight for the future of our state that may have broader implications for the future of free and fair elections across the country.

I wrote this response to Joshua Kleinfeld and Stephen Sachs’s forthcoming article, “Give Parents the Vote.” The response will be published in the Notre Dame Law Review alongside Kleinfeld and Sachs’s article. Here’s the abstract:

Joshua Kleinfeld and Stephen Sachs make a significant contribution to the literature on children’s disenfranchisement by describing and defending parental proxy voting: empowering parents to vote on their children’s behalf. The authors’ democratic critique of the status quo is particularly persuasive. Children’s exclusion from the franchise indeed distorts public policies by omitting children’s preferences from the set that policymakers consider. However, Kleinfeld and Sachs’s proposal wouldn’t do enough to correct this distortion. This is because contemporary parents diverge politically from their children, holding, on average, substantially more conservative views. The proxy votes that parents cast for their children would thus often conflict with the children’s actual desires. Fortunately, there’s an alternative policy that would fix more of the bias caused by disenfranchising children: young adult proxy voting. Under this approach, children’s votes would be allocated to not their parents but rather young adults — the cohort of adults closest in age to children. Young adults, unlike parents, are highly politically similar to children. At present, for example, both young adults and children are quite liberal. So, to update Kleinfeld and Sachs’s thesis, if we want children “to be adequately represented at the polls, we should give [young adults] the vote.”

I wrote this report for Protect Democracy on the relationship between proportional representation and the Voting Rights Act. Here’s some of the introduction:

First, the report provides background information about these topics. In particular, PR can refer to either a certain kind of electoral system or rough equivalence between a group’s share of votes in a jurisdiction and its share of legislative seats. Second, the report discusses the legal vulnerability of PR systems under the VRA. In most cases — when these systems are working as expected — they create little risk of VRA liability because they represent minority voters at least as well as (often better than) single-member districts plausibly could. Third, the report comments on PR systems as potential remedies for VRA violations. PR systems (including related semi-PR approaches) have been adopted to cure racial vote dilution dozens of times — typically through settlements, and occasionally at the request of defendants.

Fourth, the report explores the emerging role of PR systems under state voting rights acts (SVRAs). Certain SVRAs explicitly or implicitly contemplate conversion to PR or semi-PR systems to remedy statutory violations. Certain SVRAs also abandon deference to defendants with respect to choices among remedies — a feature of VRA doctrine that has sometimes prevented the adoption of PR systems. Lastly, the report identifies potential federal and state reforms that could facilitate wider conversion to PR systems through voting rights litigation. Federally, the VRA could recognize these systems as available remedies and drop the requirement that minority populations be geographically compact. At the state level, SVRAs could not merely acknowledge the availability of these systems but also favor or even mandate their use over other options.

Caroline Walker has written this comment for the Harvard Law Review on the Eighth Circuit’s decision that no private right of action exists to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The comment explores whether plaintiffs might be able to use Section 1983 to enforce Section 2 instead.

Section 1983 enables private parties to enforce a federal statute that creates an individual right, even if the statute itself does not contain a private cause of action. An individual right is enforceable under § 1983 when (1) plaintiffs show that the statute’s text and structure reflect congressional intent to create an individual right and (2) the opposing party fails to show that the statute reflects congressional intent to foreclose § 1983 enforcement of that right. . . .

Under the Supreme Court’s guidance, section 2’s text creates an individual right. Section 2 protects against any “voting qualification . . . standard, practice, or procedure . . . result[ing] in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen . . . to vote on account of race or color.” This provision contains “rights-creating” language with an “unmistakable focus on the benefited class” of citizens who hold the equal right to vote. That individual right does not disappear when the statute also “establish[es] who it is that must respect and honor the[] statutory right[].” . . .

Turning to the second prong of the § 1983 analysis, defendants are unlikely to rebut the presumption that section 2 voting rights are enforceable under § 1983. The presumption is rebutted only when “Congress ‘specifically foreclosed a remedy under § 1983.’” Specific foreclosure occurs only when the statute precludes § 1983 enforcement either explicitly or implicitly through “a ‘comprehensive enforcement scheme that is incompatible with individual enforcement under § 1983.’” Explicit foreclosure does not pose an issue here, because “[a]ny mention of . . . private remedies . . . is missing” from the VRA’s text, as the Eighth Circuit recognized. . . .

Section 1983 ensures that private individuals and groups can bring a cause of action to enforce their section 2 voting rights in the absence of any Attorney General action. Plaintiffs pleading § 1983 claims to enforce section 2 need only prove the same merits of a vote dilution or denial claim brought under section 2 itself. Section 1983 provides a viable mechanism for plaintiffs and advocates to continue fighting before the courts to protect equal voting rights against antidemocratic attacks.

Many (most?) racial gerrymandering cases have partisan as well as race-related objectives. Why did the plaintiffs sue in Alexander, the South Carolina case decided by the Court today? At least in part to try to get a second Democratic congressional district in the state. Similarly, what explains the Louisiana racial gerrymandering case whose ruling the Court stayed just last week? Again, at least partly, the (Republican) plaintiffs’ desire to stop the state from using a map with two Democratic districts.

In today’s decision in Alexander, the Court made it much more difficult for racial gerrymandering plaintiffs to achieve any partisan goals they might have. This is because the Court came close to requiring plaintiffs to submit an alternative map showing how the state could maintain its plan’s current partisan balance while fixing the alleged racial gerrymandering. The Court discounted the thousands of maps created by the plaintiffs’ experts because none of them “achieved the legislature’s partisan goal”—a Republican District 1—“while including a higher [Black voting-age population] in District 1.” The Court also held that, in the future, “trial courts should draw an adverse inference from a plaintiff’s failure to submit” an alternative map. “A plaintiff’s failure to submit an alternative map should be interpreted . . . as an implicit concession that the plaintiff cannot draw a map that undermines the legislature’s defense that the districting lines were” drawn for partisan, not racial, reasons.

After today’s decision, potential litigants with partisan aims will have much less reason to bring racial gerrymandering claims. The alternative map they’re now (essentially) required to produce is an instruction manual for the state explaining how it can remedy the violation alleged by the plaintiffs without disturbing its plan’s partisan performance. Why should partisan litigants bother suing when, to avoid a likely fatal “adverse inference” against them, they have to demonstrate to the state how to avoid any partisan consequences as a result of the suit?

Importantly, today’s decision similarly constrains Democratic and Republican litigants. I mentioned above that Alexander may have been brought, in part, to obtain another Democratic district, while Republican gain was a likely motive for the ongoing Louisiana case. A look at the whole universe of racial gerrymandering cases confirms that both parties see them, at least partly, as vehicles for pursuing partisan advantage. In the 1990s, the original cases of this kind were almost uniformly brought by white Republican plaintiffs angry about plans that simultaneously benefited Democrats and increased minority representation. In the 2010s, minority Democratic plaintiffs challenged aggressive Republican gerrymanders that used race in ham-handed, legally indefensible, ways to comply with the Voting Rights Act. This cycle, beyond the South Carolina and Louisiana cases, there have been prominent racial gerrymandering suits seeking (in part) more Democratic districts in Alabama and Texas and (also in part) more Republican districts in Michigan and Wisconsin.

What’s the problem, then, with a decision that focuses racial gerrymandering cases on racial, not partisan, grievances? The problem, in a word, is Rucho. While the Court held that partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable in Rucho, severe partisan gerrymandering remains unconstitutional—even according to Rucho—and staggeringly undemocratic. So it’s understandable that parties victimized by partisan gerrymandering want to go to court to correct this profound constitutional and democratic injury. However, Rucho prevents parties from directly asserting this harm, at least in federal court. And today’s decision more or less stops parties from trying to attack partisan gerrymanders indirectly through racial gerrymandering claims. After Alexander, parties increasingly have nowhere to turn when they’re targeted by conduct that almost everyone agrees is unlawful and undemocratic.

To be clear, the pre-Alexander situation of racial gerrymandering claims sometimes being repurposed to fight partisan gerrymandering was far from ideal. The right answer would be for courts to recognize racial and partisan gerrymandering claims, thereby allowing racial gerrymandering claims to root out race-related abuses. But Alexander moves us from a second-best to a third-best world: one where partisan gerrymandering can’t be tackled directly or indirectly, and simply becomes invisible as a matter of federal constitutional law.

Politico.

Native Americans are always an important voting bloc in Montana, where they make up 6.5 percent of the population, per U.S. Census data. But this November, their involvement could potentially impact the entire nation.

Control of the Senate may hang on the outcome of the Montana Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is up for reelection in this reliably red state, likely facing off against Republican Tim Sheehy, whom former President Donald Trump has endorsed. Trump won Montana by nearly 17 percentage points in 2020, and Tester won by 3.5 percentage points — or nearly 18,000 votes — in 2018. Montana’s tribes comprise about five percent of the voting bloc, nearly twice the margin by which Tester won his last race.

Native voters are “hugely important to the Democratic base,” says Jim Messina, an Obama White House alum and former adviser to Tester with deep political roots in Montana. Tester ousted Republican Sen. Conrad Burns in 2006 in part by siphoning off some of Burns’ support among Native Americans. “Tester was able to cut into that bloc and really move them towards him,” Messina says.

NYT.

Less than six months out from the presidential contest, leading Republicans, including several of Donald J. Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, signaling that the party may again challenge the outcome if its candidate loses.

In a series of recent interviews, Republican officials and candidates have dodged the question, responded with nonanswers or offered clear falsehoods rather than commit to a notion that was once so uncontroversial that it was rarely discussed before an election.

The evasive answers show how the former president’s refusal to concede his defeat after the 2020 election has ruptured a tenet of American democracy — that candidates are bound by the outcome. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans are now emulating his hedging well in advance of any voting.